China's Clampdown on 'Evil Cults'

On June 1, my friend Pastor Wang Yi of the Early Rain Reformed Church in Chengdu was arrested while distributing anti-forced-abortion leaflets. The stated grounds for detaining him were “illegal advertising.” He was let go after half an hour. Three days later, Mr. Wang was detained again. This time the arresting officers produced no identification and gave no reason for taking him in. After 12 hours of interrogation, he was finally released at midnight.

When I posted an account of the harassment on Weibo, a microblogging platform, several people protested against the injustice — and many wrote in support of the government’s actions. One netizen commented, “The cops have done a beautiful job!”

I wondered how many of the hostile comments were sincere and how many were made for money: The government employs a cyberpolice force of propagandists known as the 50-Cent Party. But given other recent events, and China’s agonizing history with organized religion, I believe that a good number of the pro-government comments reflected genuine opinion.

On May 28, a woman named Wu Shuoyan was beaten to death in a McDonalds restaurant in Zhaoyuan in Shandong Province while people stood by idly. The state broadcaster CCTV announced that her murderers were all members of the Church of Almighty God, a Christian sect. The CCTV report implied that the killers’ faith had some relation to the atrocity.

A few days later the government published its list of 20 active “cults.” From then on, events unfolded with a ruthless and familiar logic: Every TV channel and newspaper issued warnings about the dangers of “evil cults.” Community organizations, village authorities and schools got in on the act.

The anti-cult campaign extended to more mainstream religious practices. The People’s Daily website and the Global Times, a government newspaper, opened a barrage of attacks on China’s underground Christian churches. An article in the Global Times said “underground churches and evil cults are spreading like mushrooms ... the problem is very urgent.”

The government’s anti-religion campaign is not borne of concern for public security stemming from a horrific murder. This is a concerted effort to bring independent churches and their followers into line. The clampdown is simply the government’s way of strengthening its control of society.

As a perceived “foreign” religion, Christianity makes the Chinese leadership particularly nervous. The history of Eastern Europe in the 1980s is seen as a cautionary tale by officials such as the former head of the State Bureau of Religious Affairs, Ye Xiaowen, who often cited Christianity’s contribution to the end of Communist rule in Poland. A policy document published in September 2012 on the Religious Affairs Bureau’s website stated that unlawful religious groups are “threatening China’s national security.”

It’s hard to pin down the number of Christians in China, but it’s clearly growing. In 2010, government figures put the number of Christians at 23 million. The Pew Research Center estimated in April that Christians account for around 5.1 percent of the Chinese population, or 67 million believers, of whom around 58 million are Protestants and 9 million are Catholics. Fenggang Yang, a professor of sociology at Purdue University, projected that by 2030, China would have the world’s largest Christian population.

China has two classes of Christian churches: One group is legal and consists of state-approved congregations; the other is illegal and includes what are called “home churches” or “underground churches.”

The legal churches belong to the “Three-Self Patriotic Movement,” a government-backed umbrella organization that operates on the principle of freedom from foreign interference. The prerequisite for becoming a legal church is to accept being managed by the government: Most clergy are trained at state-sanctioned seminaries.

The illegal churches are independent congregations that operate without state-approval and are buffeted by frequent crackdowns. State media routinely presents underground churches as an American Trojan horse.

But in the latest crackdown, even legal churches are fair game for the government’s bulldozers. In Zhejiang Province in the southeast, churches once treated as legal now face persecution. At least 10 of them have had their crosses destroyed or have been completely demolished. Until recently, Sanjiang Church was considered the crown jewel of the city of Wenzhou, which has been called “China’s Jerusalem” because of its many churches. On April 28, Sanjiang was razed as part of the crackdown.

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, communism has been promoted as the “religion” of the Chinese people, while traditional religions have been suppressed. During the Cultural Revolution, countless temples and churches were demolished. Many Buddhist monks and Christian clergy were forced into leading secular lives. As a result, traditional belief systems like Confucianism and Buddhism were weakened. But as the country has opened up, Chinese people have gained more personal freedoms and with that a renewed desire for faith. To many believers, Christianity is filling a spiritual vacuum and offering a sense of belonging.

Still, given the decades of anti-religion propaganda, and despite Christianity’s growing appeal, many Chinese people are ignorant about religion, and many even express disgust with it. Like the fighters of the anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion in the late-19th century, they are easily manipulated into viewing foreign faiths as evil sects.

On June 1, a CCTV report outlined the “six characteristics of evil cults,” which a legal “expert” said included the cult of personality, immorality and restrictions of individual and spiritual freedom. As many Chinese people took to the Internet with renewed anti-religious fervor to thank the government for exposing the true nature of “evil cults,” I realized that the name of the biggest cult is hidden in plain view: the Communist Party.

Murong Xuecun, a novelist and blogger, is the author of “Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu” and “Dancing Through Red Dust.” This article was translated by Harvey Thomlinson from the Chinese.